Saturday, 29 May 2010

The start of the final push

Saturday 29th May

With not long to go now before the river season is upon us ive decided to concentrate all my fishing efforts on getting a decent Tench before i run out of time. If i dont get one in the next couple of weeks then theyll have to wait till the next closed season cos ill be too busy chasing the river species in the meantime!

Todays trip was to be on the estate lake i started fishing at the beginning of this closed season. A friend had an 8lb Tench from here last week so its as good a place as any to try for a lump. Tench of that size are pretty hard to come by in my area as there arnt many waters around here which hold them.

Despite arriving on the bank at about 4.45am i was most surprised to find pretty much every peg stitched up already. Most people were just setting up and i rued the fact id pressed the snooze button on the alarm twice! The forcast had given out rain this morning and with a light breeze pushing into the road bank on the lake i managed to squeeze into a spot there.

The Tench were certainly very active along this bank as i could clearly see frothy patches of bubbles coming up accompanied by several fish head and shouldering in the area too. Thatll do me i thought as i sent a couple of maggot feeders out to them.

Straight away i started getting liners and within 20 minutes the first fish of the day, a tench of about 5lb, was soon banked. This was quickly followed by a 7lb Bream on the same rod. After this it all went decidedly quite for a while. I got the impression that something was amiss so i decided to try a change of bait.

I found a tub of halibut pellets in my bag, god knows how long theyd been in there but they smelt ok so one was soon winging its way out into the lake on a method feeder rig. Within about 5 minutes the rod was away and i struck into what felt like either a Carp or a big Tench which had me backwinding right from first contact with it. It plodded out towards the middle of the lake on an unstoppable run and the hook pulled.

Within minutes of recasting, the same rod was away yet again and the culprit proved to a Tench of around 5lb.

After this i thought id give the bait a bit more visual impact by tipping it with half a bright orange pop-up boilie. Tutti-frutti halibut pellets eh? bet they havent seen many of those before! Whether theyd seen it before or not it didnt matter cos i lost a fish on it about half hour later, at least i knew theyd pick it up.

With around an hour left before i planned on packing up, i put the cocktail bait on both rods and went on to catch two more Tench to round the trip off nicely. The last fish was just shy of 6lb and looked rather tatty unfortunately. Its the biggest ive had from the lake so far but i think im gonna have to play the numbers game to get amongst the bigger fish. Its common knowledge theyre in there but from what people tell me theres a lot of smaller fish showing this year which doesnt help matters. Nobody said this specimen hunting lark was gonna be easy!